


do i dare (disturb the universe)

by void_fish



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 13:18:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12388854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/void_fish/pseuds/void_fish
Summary: The Blue Jackets win the draft lottery.Auston drafts a text to Zach: /Did you do this?/





	do i dare (disturb the universe)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gigantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gigantic/gifts).



> so i started writing this for the usa exchange earlier this year, and long story short i had to default, but i liked this concept so much that i've been plugging away at it ever since. here you go CJ! only six months late.
> 
> thanks to lil for betaing this and generally being an angel 
> 
> one day i might write something long and not about how magic zach werenski is. today is not that day.

Auston is fifteen the first time he puts on the red, white and blue jersey of America. 

Being in Columbus feels a little bit like that again. The colours are the same. The hockey is the same. Zach is the same. 

He makes the team out of training camp because of course he does. He’s only eighteen, but he knows what he is, and what he is is really fucking good at hockey, okay?

The Jackets put him in an apartment building with the rest of the rookies. Part of him hopes he’ll be able to live with Zach; having a familiar face in the middle of all this would be nice, after all. But it turns out Zach already has a roommate, Andy, who is big and smiles a lot and calls Auston A-Matts. 

Not that it matters. He and Zach still get to play CoD all the time, so it’s almost like being back in Zurich, late at night, yelling at Zach down the tinny Xbox microphone. 

There are a lot of things that are familiar to Auston in Columbus. The colours, the crowds, the ice. The _hockey_. Zach. But it’s-- wrong. He can’t put his finger on it at first, but sometimes he’ll catch himself in the reflection of the glass, in Union blue, or he’ll see himself on a banner outside Nationwide, or he’ll sign some little kid’s jersey, and it’s-- wrong. Weird. Not how it’s supposed to be. 

He says that to Zach once. They’re drinking in his apartment with Andy, who just disappeared into his room, presumably to have phone sex with whoever he’s dating this week. 

“Do you ever feel like you’re not supposed to be here?” he asks, three beers in, looking over at Zach, red cheeked. He gets really flushed when he drinks.

(It’s kind of cute, Auston thinks, before squashing the thought.)

“Like, here in this apartment? Or--”

“Here in Columbus,” Auston clarifies. 

Zach tilts his head. He has cheeto dust on his cheek. 

“Are you surprised that you made the team?” he asks. “Did you really think they’d send you back to Zurich?”

“No,” Auston says. Zach snorts, but it’s not mean. He knows exactly how good Auston is, too. “I mean, like-- I feel like I should be playing somewhere else. Like Columbus shouldn’t have drafted me.”

“You don’t think you deserved to go first overall?” Zach sounds confused. 

Auston gives up, goes to the fridge for another beer. 

-

Auston dreams about playing hockey, is the thing. But he dreams about brighter blue jerseys, a bigger arena. He scores four goals one dream and the cannon doesn’t go off after any of them. 

He wakes up sweating and uneasy. 

-

When Auston was a kid, he wanted to play for the Coyotes. When he got a little older, he thought about how cool it would be to play for an Original Six team. Detroit, maybe, or Boston.

Columbus isn’t his hometown team, and it’s not the Montreal Canadiens, but it’s-- 

Auston takes about two weeks to realise that Columbus is special.

The first time the cannon goes off, he’s expecting it, but he jumps anyway. Jens, on his wing, laughs at him, but it’s fond, and punches him gently in the shoulder.

-

Auston never got to play pond hockey growing up. Too hot. Too arid. Too-- Arizona.

He dreams about playing outdoors, wearing a blue and white bobble hat to walk from the locker room to the rink. Dreams about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, of facing down Hockeytown Red jerseys. Dreams of scoring the game winner.

Wakes up feeling dislocated. He’s in the wrong place. He blinks up at the ceiling, at the water stain that Andy swears looks like his great-gramma. His Xbox light blinks at him; he rolled onto the controller when he woke up. He must have fallen asleep playing Chel with Matty.

It takes him a long time to fall asleep again, and when he does, he’s bumping visors with a teammate he doesn’t recognise. 

-

Winter in Columbus is fucking _cold_.

Zach takes him to buy a winter coat in November, when the temperature drops so much his window has frost on it when he wakes up one morning. 

Zach’s cheeks flush in the cold, and he’s wearing a bobble hat and gloves. He looks _ridiculous_.

He talks Auston into trying on a giant, puffy parka, just a few shades of blue lighter than Union, before they settle on a long, charcoal grey overcoat with a deep purple lining. It makes him look older. Like a different person. 

-

‘Matts! Matts!’

He passes without thinking, without _needing_ to think, it’s easy. Effortless. The puck goes off a stick and in. Celly. Skate. Bench. _Easy_.

It takes him three whole heartbeats to realise that the cannon didn’t go off, even though they’re facing a team wearing white. 

It takes him a heartbeat longer to realise that this isn’t Nationwide. The heartbeat after that, and he’s looking at Bob as he flips the puck out of his net and stands to squirt water over his face.

He wakes up cold, and can’t get back to sleep. 

-

The first time Auston kissed Zach, he was seventeen and drunk and too stupid not to.

Zach had kissed him back for a brief, horrible second before pulling away, wrapping a hand around his shoulder, thumb pressing on his collarbone, and he looks at Auston, sad, before shaking his head.

‘We can’t,’ he says. ‘We just-- we can’t. I’m sorry.’

-

Auston’s old hockey coach had just enough magic to create a new puck every time he sent one over the glass and into the stands when they were practicing. They used to vibrate ever so slightly whenever Auston picked them up at the end of practice.

He grew up with a kid whose only magic was the ability to get to a place before the line got long. His sister, Alexandria, could sort coins into groups of five without even having to focus. She used to do it with her piggy bank savings when she was a kid, sorting the quarters into groups of five and then collecting them up again.

Zach is so magic he gives off feedback whenever he walks past the sensors at Nationwide. He’s so magic that Auston’s fingertips go numb when he touches him, even through gloves and three layers of clothing.

Auston-- Auston has hockey. It’s not magic, not like Zach, but it’s good enough.

-

Auston has seen Zach actively use his magic exactly once.

Nova Scotia in January is brutal. Auston doesn’t think he’s ever been this cold in his life, but Zach’s from Michigan, so he tells him to suck it up and put on an extra pair of socks, and they sneak out for pizza.

They find a cat on the side of the road, legs bent at ugly angles, fur stiff with frost. One eye looks up at them.

Zach crouches next to it.

‘It’s dead,’ Auston says. ‘Come on, just leave it.’

Zach reaches out to touch it, but before Auston can tell him not to, that he’ll get some kind of weird Canadian cat plague, he’s taken his glove off, brushed bare fingertips down the cats side, and it shimmers out of view.

‘What the fuck?’ Auston asks.

Zach looks up at him. Auston can’t figure out the expression on his face. ‘You got generational talent,’ he says. ‘I got this.’

They get hot chocolate at Timmies, wrap stiff fingers around the cardboard cups and sit in a corner, away from the families, the kids, the students typing feverishly on laptops.

‘What happened to it?’ Auston asks, when he’s drained his cup. He turns it around and around in his hands.

‘I--’ Zach starts and stops. He takes another sip of his hot chocolate, which must be cold by now. ‘This sounds dumb. But I-- sent it to a different time?’

‘Like, back in time?’

‘Like-- sideways, I guess,’ Zach says. ‘I stopped it from getting hit by a car by moving the cat to a timeline where it wouldn’t die there. I don’t really know how to explain it.’

Auston picks up a napkin, starts shredding it into confetti. ‘Huh,’ he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Zach shrugs one shoulder up and down. His ears are still pink with cold, even after hiding them under a red, white and blue bobble hat.

-

The second time Auston kisses Zach, it’s the fourth of July, there are fireworks going off, and Zach doesn’t push him away this time.

Maybe because it’s the last time Auston will get to see Zach before he leaves again for Michigan, before Auston goes to-- wherever he’s going to go. Everett, maybe. Europe, maybe. Auston doesn’t know.

Maybe it’s because they’re both drunk on fucking Natty Light.

Zach’s wearing swim shorts stolen from Auston’s suitcase. They're way too big for him, and they sit way too low on his hips. When Auston touches the sunburn covering his stupidly pale shoulders he gasps into his mouth. He doesn’t know why Zach is letting him do this, but he knows that the sun is setting and that they could do this forever.

-

They sleep in the same bed. Zach has his arm slung over Auston’s belly. He’s snoring.

Auston thinks harder than he should about asking Zach if there’s a universe out there where they end up in the same place. Instead he just laces their fingers together and drifts off. 

He dreams about the WJC. 

-

Zach goes eighth overall to Columbus. One night, Auston gets woken up by his phone buzzing with a text.

_Maybe Columbus will draft you_ , it says. _Toronto is too far away_.

-

Auston spends his first professional season in Switzerland wishing he was just a little bit further away from the NHL. He doesn’t read the articles about how he’s going to the Maple Leafs, about the tanking for Matthews campaign, about the people writing his name on masking tape and sticking it to their jerseys.

He thinks a lot about just-- staying in Zurich. He likes the Lions. The team is full of good guys, his mom and his sister are living with him, he’s learning German, it’s-- much less stressful than being drafted, from what he’s heard.

The thing about Switzerland is that there’s no Zach. 

They talk all the time, and Auston stays up stupid late so Zach can kick his ass at Chel. It’s-- not the worst, he guesses, but. He’s always been bad at sleeping alone.

-

He dreams about being in Michigan one night. He’s a student, he guesses. He’s at a party, anyway. Zach is there, playing beer pong and losing. He laughs and catches Auston’s eye across the room, winking. 

They have messy, clumsy, not-as-quiet-as-they-should-be sex in the basement. 

‘Welcome to college,’ dream Zach says, looking up at Auston from his knees.

The dream is vivid enough that Auston wakes up with the taste of cheap beer in his mouth. 

-

The Blue Jackets win the draft lottery.

Auston drafts a text to Zach: _Did you do this?_

_No_ , Zach replies, and then, _I would have if I’d known how._

-

Zach has a sign for him at the airport. It’s just a big _#1_ on dark blue construction paper.

‘Subtle,’ Auston says, but lets Zach pull him into a hug, and when they pull back, his lips are just barely turned up and his eyes are sparkling in that Zach way that means he’s basically full body laughing.

Zach’s car is giant and unnecessary, but it has tinted windows, and that means Auston can lean over the center console and kiss him for long enough that they get beeped at by someone waiting to take their parking space.

Zach’s cheeks are pink even in the dark of the parking lot, and he’s properly smiling now, showing his teeth and everything. Auston gives him a smile back, and pushes his hair out of his face, clicks his seatbelt on.

-

Auston has been in love with hockey since he first put on a pair of skates. He fell in love with baseball the first time he picked up a bat. 

Auston has always fallen in love easy. He didn’t stand a chance with Zach.

-

He gets an 8 tattooed on the thin skin of his wrist, easily hidden by his watch band. He tells the tattoo artist it’s an infinity symbol, but he knows, and Zach knows. 

Zach kisses it when Auston shows him. It’s gentler than he usually is, like Auston’s going to break.

-

Auston’s season in Columbus goes well. He makes the All Star Team, the Jackets are winning, everything is good.

His dreams are getting worse. Darker. He dreams of the ice shattering under his skates. Every lightbulb in the arena blowing.

He’s not sleeping, and judging by the dark circles under Zach’s eyes, he doesn’t think he is, either.

‘Are you okay?’ he asks one morning, when Andy’s in the shower, and they’re eating breakfast.

Zach frowns at him. ‘I’m fine,’ he says, and sounds like he means it. ‘Why?’

‘You look tired,’ Auston says. ‘And-- I’ve been having weird dreams.’

Zach shakes his head. His hair is sticking up a million different ways. ‘I’m fine,’ he repeats.

Auston drops it.

Andy comes out of the shower, and they all eat together, and they drive to the rink.

-

They’re fighting a lot more, recently. They don’t talk. Auston’s slept alone in his own bed for a week straight. He hasn’t done that since training camp.

He feels like an exposed nerve ending. He’s not sleeping, he’s barely eating. He drops his gloves in a game they should have won and end up losing five-two.

Nothing feels _right._

-

He dreams the world is ending. He dreams that the sky is ripping open.

He dreams of blood on the ice.

He dreams that everything is breaking apart in his hands, and when he wakes up, he doesn’t recognise his apartment.

-

Auston breaks a skate blade during a game, catches it in a groove in the ice and he feels something in his ankle pop as he goes down.

Zach helps him off the ice, pale with worry. ‘I can fix it,’ he says. ‘If it’s-- if it’s really bad, I think I can fix it.’

Auston gets a walking boot, a canister of the good painkillers, and six weeks on the IR list. Zach picks him up from the hospital and they drive home in silence. Auston’s whole leg throbs.

‘I can fix it,’ Zach says, again.

Auston counts the pulse in his foot and stares at the rain on the windscreen.

‘Don’t,’ he says.

‘But--’ Zach starts, and trails off. ‘You’re supposed to win the Calder,’ he says. ‘We’re going to the _playoffs_.’

‘All of those things will still happen,’ Auston says, and then he pauses. ‘I keep having bad dreams,’ he says, and Zach doesn’t say anything. ‘Or I dream about--’ another pause. ‘Another me.’

The car is silent, apart from the click of the turn signal as he pulls into the parking lot of their building.

‘When I asked you if you brought me here, you said no,’ Auston says. He watches Zach’s hands on the steering wheel. They don’t flinch. Zach is waiting for him. ‘Did you lie to me, Z?’

There is a just-too-long pause.

‘I love you,’ Zach says. ‘I-- I wanted to be with you.’

‘So you changed-- the future?’

‘No,’ Zach says. ‘There’s-- I don’t know how to explain it.’

‘Try,’ Auston says, grim.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Zach says, pleading.

-

‘It’s not changing the future,’ Zach says. ‘I don’t think, anyway. It’s like--’ He pauses. ‘There’s somewhere out there where we didn’t win the lottery. I think.’

Auston frowns. He's sitting in the armchair with his ankle propped up on the coffee table. It throbs.

‘Like-- an alternate universe?’

‘Maybe,’ he says.

‘This-- universe-- isn’t supposed to exist, is it?’

Zach shakes his head.

‘Can you fix it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Zach says. ‘I think-- Not without-- putting things back how they were before.’

‘Which means me in Toronto.’

Zach pauses, and nods. Then, suddenly, he reaches out and grabs Auston’s wrist, holds it tight, brushes his thumb over the tattoo there. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he says. ‘Please-- not yet. Just-- think about it.’

‘Is there even anything to _think_ about?’ Auston asks, but he doesn’t pull away. ‘Either things go back, or-- what? What’s our other option?’

‘We get to stay together,’ Zach says.

‘And the universe gets ripped apart,’ Auston says. ‘I can _feel_ it, Z. I’m-- I’m not supposed to be here.’

‘Auston--’ Zach starts, and then stops. ‘Give me until the end of the season. Please. Just a couple more months. Then if you still want to fix it, I-- I’ll put things back.’

-

Auston lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. His foot hurts. Zach is asleep beside him for the first time in a week. His breath is hot on Auston’s bare chest, and he’s carefully arranged so he can’t kick Auston’s bad ankle in his sleep.

He thinks about playing for the Leafs. He’s been dreaming about it for long enough, it almost feels right. He can’t tell the difference between the shades of blue anymore. It’s all just hockey.

-

Auston wins the Calder.

The Blue Jackets make the playoffs. They make the _Finals_. They don't win, but.

Auston hasn’t slept in weeks. Every time he closes his eyes, all he can hear is goal horns and screaming. His ankle aches.

Next to him, Zach snuffles.

Auston loves him so much he doesn’t know how to not.

He brushes the small scar underneath Zach’s eyebrow, and he makes a choice.

Zach blinks a sleepy eye open. It’s like he knows what Auston is thinking.

Auston makes eye contact for a moment, before looking down. It’s long enough to see Zach’s gaze get sad and distant, and he reaches out to take Auston’s hand, squeezing it tightly.

‘Okay,’ he says, voice hoarse from sleep. ‘Okay.’

-

There’s no Zach in Toronto. There’s a small, dark haired kid with a big, toothy smile and a heart the size of the GTA.

Auston drafts half a dozen texts. He doesn’t send any of them.

  
  



End file.
